


Anagnorisis

by minuseven, Speckleflower



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: All Magic Comes With a Price, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Tragedy, Consequences, F/M, GabeNath Reverse Bang, Grief/Mourning, Hubris, Minor Emilie Agreste/Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Miracles, Wishes, greek tragedy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:41:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28131066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minuseven/pseuds/minuseven, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Speckleflower/pseuds/Speckleflower
Summary: «Define Hubris»Gabriel never considered how much an Deus Ex Machina would cost.
Relationships: Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/Nathalie Sancoeur
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23
Collections: GabeNath Reverse Bang 2020





	Anagnorisis

**Author's Note:**

> **Minuseven::** It's nothing too innovative (I'm sure something like this has been written before) but I just couldn't help myself. There's a cute little gimmick in the writing (more info at the end) but honestly this is the super specific sort of thing I like to read (and I hope other people like too) and Speckleflower's art was... just perfect 💖. I didn't even realize I was writing in the present tense.
> 
> The French present in this story will have translations in the end. And if the html works, the text will link to them and back up. This story was beta'd by the wonderful [Nightshade_Blaize (AO3)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightshade_Blaize/).
> 
> Here's a link to the [ART](https://speckleflowersummer.tumblr.com/post/637775742529404928/) made by [Speckleflower (tumblr)](https://speckleflowersummer.tumblr.com/).

* * *

**Monster attacks Paris - live coverage**

**Ladybug, Chat Noir and Hawkmoth**  
What we know about the heroes and villain of Paris

 **The LadyBlogger** _@superalcesaire_  
Ladybug confirms the existence of a new supervillain, allied to Papillon! Full interview at #LadyBlogNews ! #Ladybug #ChatNoir #Miraculous

 **Sorbonne Université** _@Sorbonne_Univ__  
ALERTE - Akuma attack reported near #iledelacite #sorbonnepantheon on lockdown. Careful #étudiants in #paris5

 **JT MerciLesMiracles** _@jean_trestretiens78_  
just saw papillon make ladybug detransform #prayforparis  
|  
**RealLifeWaxPerson** _@veronique33cire_  
And now @Nadia_Chamak is reporting Mayura got Chat Noir too D: #prayforparis #prayforladybug #prayforchatnoir

* * *

Hawkmoth falls to one knee. His legs burn with exertion and his breath is heavy, the sound filling his sanctuary’s abode. He can’t feel it at all. His heart galops with excitement, with relief. He has done it. The ladybug miraculous sits tightly in his palm, greedily engulfed by his fingers. This is his chance and nothing will make him let go of it.

Mayura arrives with a flutter of fabric, a blur through the open skylight, delicately touching the floor with nary a sound. One of her hands too, is clasped tightly against her breast. A ring digs into her fingers, one she refuses to look at, but she cannot forget what she has seen. God forbids her from it, for he shall surely not forgive her.

“Hawkmoth,” she makes herself say, voice coming out raspier than she intended, “we don’t have much time.”

The man laughs and rises. His hands slot on top of her hips like they were made for them. “My dear Mayura, finally we have succeeded! The ladybug and black cat miraculous are ours. How can we not celebrate?” Without any sign of effort, he lifts her and twirls them both. “Soon, everything will be alright!”

“Hawkmoth!” Her response is biting and unexpected. He sets her down almost immediately, eyes previously wide in happiness now alarmed. “We have to hurry!”

“Mayura?” Exhaustion pulls at her shoulders and he curses himself for not noticing sooner. She is so stubborn, particularly so with her own health. He should have known the plan would require just a little too much out of her.

“I’m sorry Sir, we were pursued.” She takes a step away from his hands and presses the coveted shape of a ring into them. “Make the wish. Before it is too late.”

He searches her face but her eyes avoid his. He nods. “You are correct, as always.” It is natural that she looks tired. It has been over a year since his venture began. Things were supposed to have been very different. This journey, however long and treacherous, will soon be over. Everything they did will have been worth it. “Dark wings fall.”

Gabriel Agreste turns his back to Mayura and walks towards the expansive view of the city of Paris. A column of smoke rises in the distance. He cuts an imposing figure, tall and dark, more so even than he did as Hawkmoth, to Mayura’s eyes. This is the true Gabriel Agreste. A man who would do anything to bring the love of his life back into his arms. That would never be her. She has no right to him or his heart, she reminds herself. Such moroseness coming from one such as her, a heartless witch allied with the greatest threat Paris faced in the modern age, is rather pathetic.

How unlike her. It must be the finality of these moments.

She watches as he cleans the earrings and ring before putting them on. There is a lightness to his movements, an energy different from his usual grand gestures. She would almost call it gentleness. The soft touch and smile of when things are going his way. The care he had with her at her weakest points. But that would be a fanciful lie meant only for herself.

The kwamis of the legendary miraculous are resistant. They look upon him with fear, and pity and scorn in turn. But Gabriel knows very well that no kwami can resist an order from their wielder. They warn him of the consequences, of a price. He is ready. Today their wielder is him, and the forces of life and death answer to him.

He takes a deep breath. This is Nathalie’s last chance. It whispers to her from inside her chest, desperate. She curls her fingers into her palm and squashes it. She grits her teeth, stays her breath.

“Unify.”

There are no words to describe the power that can both create and destroy.

It is like being God, who wished for light and light was, who called down destruction, and destruction came.

Gabriel has one wish. He thinks of nothing else. He shuts down his awareness. Of his body, of Mayura behind him watching with dull eyes, of Adrien somewhere outside, of the police and the other heroes racing towards this place, of what the future will be like…

Gabriel has one wish. The peacock miraculous unbroken, glimmering beneath her snow-speckled gloves. Her laughter, untainted, as she twirls in his arms with blue skin and pink eyes. And all that doesn’t happen because she never leaves him. All the days he doesn’t lose to the numbness of solitude, all the times he doesn’t run from the last light in his life, all the people he doesn’t use, all the blood he doesn’t spill.

There’s the flash of a transformation and Hawkmoth stands in front of Mayura. He raises his head, searching futilely for his wish. His breathing is ragged, strained from the power that had been him just a second before. He checks his fingers, his ears, but the miraculous are gone.

Something invisible crumbles inside Nathalie’s heart. That was hope. Whatever happens now, she knows it’s over. Gabriel might not deserve what is coming, but she does.

“It worked.” He knows it did. “I felt it work.” So what was happening? He looks outside but the smoke still rises from Paris, evidence of his quest. Why hadn’t anything changed? The damage across Paris should be gone, his quest never started, all the danger and heartbreak nonexistent.

Something prickles within Mayura’s chest. This is it. Her next inhale is shaky. She feels like crying. Her eyes have been dry for two years, moisture only coming to the fore when her body’s biological functions absolutely forced it. Reflex tears. This isn’t just that. She must make a sound because she sees Gabriel flinch in her direction and then he’s moving to reach her. The world tilts. She’s falling.

Hawkmoth heard the barest of scuffs on the floor and his body moved on his own. The hitch in her breath before it starts to fail her, the stutter in her steps when her legs buckle under her weight. He knows these sounds, has trained himself to notice them because she will never admit to weakness in front of him. He hasn’t heard them in weeks, but it doesn’t dull his response.

He still barely catches her toppling form. “Mayura? Nathalie? What is wrong?” What did he do wrong? Is it his wish? Frantic eyes drop down to the brooch pinned to her chest, but can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Her breath is shaky but clear. Her eyes are distant and shiny.

Pale fingers grasp at his sleeve. She raises one arm beyond him, reaching for the sky behind him. “Gabriel...” She asks him to turn around, to see what she does, but he cannot tear his attention from her rapidly palling skin.

He takes her hand, holds her carefully. He laces his fingers with hers, a promise and a comfort. “Please, what is going on? Nathalie?” He doesn’t want to reach out with the butterfly, in fear of what he’d find within her. There’s an understanding in her gaze he does not want to comprehend.

Mayura looks over Hawkmoth’s shoulder, so she sees and knows. The smoke returns to the fire, the fire folds back into itself. The sun walks backwards in the sky. The moon returns. It waxes and wanes in between suns, across seasons and colors.

It did work.

“Look… it worked, Gabriel.” She turns her eyes back to his, and for once in their long time together, they are fully open to him. For the first time, he can see the honest depths of her feelings. Hawkmoth connects with her involuntarily, a riptide of unspoken words and desires dragging him under.

“No.” He shakes his head. “No, this cannot be.”

Mayura doesn’t answer him. He reads it in the slightest of curves of her lips. The tension in her eyebrows. The wet veil over her eyes. A woman so hard to read, fully exposed to him alone. And she is going… no.

There was going to be a price. He knew that was a possibility, a certainty even. He was prepared to pay it. Gabriel was prepared to pay it. Not Nathalie. Why would she have to pay the price for him? It makes no sense. It shouldn’t be happening. Yet his partner is nothing but acceptance and silent grief. She had known.

“No, please.”

Something is wrong indeed.

“You can’t. Never again, Nathalie. I can’t- Not-”

Nathalie’s life cannot be the price, because Gabriel is not willing to pay it.

“Not you.”

Behind his silver, grinning mask, his eyes widen. It is not a realization as much as it is a crystallization. Thoughts he’s had before rush through him as his lips beg for a reprieve. A replacement.

What would his life be without placid blue eyes, clear as the Alps’ crystal lakes, just as cold and mysterious, meeting his own over a tablet, over a shoulder, across a doorway, on the other side of a window? What would he be without the invisible hand of her guidance, a discipline that imposed order and substance onto the very very chaos of time? Who would be able to approach him without fear, who would even dare, whose repulsive touch would substitute her firm hands?

He would have Émilie. He would.

But what about her perfume, the cleansing lavender his nose would catch in his office? What about that rebellious streak of red, that almost arrogant flash of certainty in her eyes he saw when they made plans? What about her cutting wit, the dry sarcasm in her voice as she spoke for him? What about her smile, just for him?

He can’t lose it. He can’t lose her.

Many times, they flirted with disaster, but this one was different.

When Hawkmoth gave power to the rabble of Paris, he’d made plans to keep her safe.

When Gabriel Agreste had come under scrutiny, he’d made sure she wouldn’t be implicated.

When Mayura had taken to the battlefield, he’d taken the accursed power away before it was too late.

When Nathalie fell ill, he’d gotten her the best care in the world.

He would have put her in a crystal coffin right next to Émilie if it came down to it.

When did she become a vital part of his existence? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. But it changes everything. He breached the realm of God, flying high with Icarus’ wings. Now the sun takes its due, burning away the one person holding him together. Gabriel is falling. He will not survive this fall.

His grip on her fingers tightens painfully. His breaths are coming short and sharp, speckled with pleads for mercy he will not receive. Mayura sees this, more than that, she feels the turmoil in his heart. The black hurricane of emotions overwhelming this man she has given everything for. The impotence of her situation makes the tears gathered in her eyes spill over. The glimmer of hope she feels at his realization is crushed inside her collapsing heart.

Nathalie is a woman who swore her very being to his cause, until the end of the line.

She sees the tracks plunging into an unknown abyss, so close now.

“Gabriel… Promise me something.” The words are like dust in her mouth. The disintegration of her heart spreads from within, in tune with the astral clock’s rewinding. Sand in an hourglass, flowing upwards, leaving her hollowed out. How many more breaths does she still have?

“Anything, anything!” He gathers her close to him, desperate to hear her heart still beating, to feel the heat fleeing her body. He knows what she will feel like, cold, pale and still under a crystal dome, and he cannot stand it. What is one more promise?! His word, given, immaterial only until he carves it into existence. 

The miraculous on her chest creaks. Gaps smooth into place; minuscule, shimmering particles filling the empty spaces. When the last long-lost piece of the miraculous slots back into its rightful place, Mayura’s transformation drops. Blue fire and ghostly feathers race across her form in the blink of an eye. All that is left is Nathalie. Red and black and blue eyes.

“Be happy.” She tells him and chides herself. Do not think of what-ifs, of different choices, of beautiful lies.

His breath catches in his throat. A moment hangs in the air before he manages to whisper, “I can’t.” She asks of him the only thing he is incapable of. Gabriel defied God, announced his rebellion against fate and the natural order with butterflies pouring out of loudspeakers over Notre-Dame. His dark might rocked Paris incessantly, like waves, and today it managed to sink the proud city to its knees. An unstoppable force in his devotion, bending the outside world to his will until it snapped.

Utterly useless against the ghosts dwelling within.

He does not know what it means to let go of something. Gabriel is a selfish, self-centered man, incapable of losing, stubborn to self-destructive levels. He lost once, and he spent every day after fighting to win it back from Death’s very own jaws.

How foolish of him to think Death would ever let him do as he pleased.

He has never known what to do with this marvel of a woman, who threw herself onto the scythe without hesitation. Both a gift and curse, who now breaks his heart with three little words. How dare she ask this of him? How dare she ask to be forgotten? For him to let go of these feelings, long-waiting embers suddenly blazing brightly?

“Let me go… This is my wish. Je suis contente.”  [1] She lies.

All of his hopes and dreams crumble into ashes. Black sand slips through his fingers.

* * *

i don’t want to look outside  
lights wird

its going to b ok

i lov  
had to say it be4 thend of teh ráÚÆ Þ¥¿▀

i loÞ¥¿????☒

Ř§Ů ráÚÆ Ř§Ů©â€š�

**Feathered Plague Beware: Paris mayor declares war on pigeons**

**Man arrested for ‘aggressive’ altercation with newly deployed Falconeer**

* * *

[ **Art by Speckleflower** ](https://speckleflowersummer.tumblr.com/post/637775742529404928/)  
  
[ **Art by Speckleflower** ](https://speckleflowersummer.tumblr.com/post/637775742529404928/)

“Je t’aime.”  [2]

Gabriel blinks. His right hand grips the edge of his work tablet while his left has his pen. His fingers curl uncomfortably around it. He puts his pen down. He is not left-handed, like… some people. Why would he… nevermind. He is merely tired.

A mess of black lines fills the center of his canvas. He grabs the bridge of his nose under his glasses. Make that very tired. What had possessed him to just… scribble all over a blank model like a five-year old child? Less than that even. At that age Adrien had at least tried to color within the lines.

He sighs and deletes the layer. A shiver goes up his spine. There is absolutely no reason for it.

He knows- he knew somebody left-handed. That’s why he had… a left-handed keyboard delivered to… He pushes away from his tablet, because he clearly needs a break. His eyes and head hurt, his nose stings. “Nathalie, I’m taking a-” He misses a step and stumbles. Through sheer muscle memory, he turns his head to the other end of his atelier. There’s nothing but the same wall as there has always been. A small lemon tree stretches across the stretch of it, branches carefully trimmed to leave it as flat as possible without compromising its health overly much. Two small potted cypresses flank the indoor tree.

His mouth is dry as he approaches it. He stops several steps away from it, looks down. It would be a good spot to stop, if there was a desk here. Plenty of space for him, a comfortable corner for... an assistant, some secretarial type that would be able to communicate with him without having to knock on the atelier’s door every time.

Gabriel knows he has a secretary. But he also has an assistant… right?

Nausea rises in him. Suddenly, he is feeling lost. Unmoored in an invisible storm. The floor lurches under him. He is falling upwards, heels over head, never fully completing a revolution. His fingers scratch at the spot under his cravat, looking for an anchor, a safe port in this calamitous whirlwind of emotion. God, he thinks he’s going to vomit.

“Gabriel?” A delicate touch on his shoulder returns him to earth.

He gasps. “É-Émilie?”

A vision of golden hair and spring green eyes overtake his vision. She kissed him as she left at breakfast and she’s been dead for two years. Her hands chase the cold from him with the same frigid fingers that he’d slid her ring from. She’s the only person who can make him laugh and she’s left him a shattered mess of porcelain and barbed wire.

He would kill for this woman. Dear God, he has killed for her. He killed-

Right next to him, his wife examines him with furrowed brows. Deep lines of concern mar her cherubic face. “You look sick,” she tells him. “Come sit down, I’ll get you some sparkling water.”

“You don’t need to,” he says automatically. Sparkling water wouldn’t help with this. “It’s just… a dizzy spell.”

Émilie raises a hand to his cheek. “Gabriel… you’re crying.”

“Oh.” He is. “I was just… I remembered… I forgot.”

His wife guides his torpid body to the dining room. He stumbles when he lays eyes on the square sofa chairs in front of the fireplace. Red like blood flashes through his vision. He drops almost bonelessly across one of them and it’s a struggle to get his breathing under control. How many times had he been the one to lead her to this very spot?

None. Too many.

He does not open his eyes when Émilie puts a cool glass in his hands. He drinks his sparkling water. Her arms embrace him and he lets himself sink into them. He wants to be comforted by her, but every time he breathes he inhales roses. The last time he had been embraced, it had been lavender. He gasps uselessly trying to comprehend a moment that didn’t exist, all while a body that should comfort him drags him deeper into bitter remembrances.

He worries Émilie. Half of him cares. The other is desperately trying to erase the memory of Nathalie’s touch. This is what she wanted of him.

No matter what he tells himself, his heart remains broken.

All for a woman he has never met.

The thought has him out of bed in the early hours of the morning. He wanders through a house missing paintings, missing details, while having too many photographs and too many decorations. He cannot even enter his own atelier for sudden fear that the portrait behind his spot is different. It isn’t. They commissioned that piece from a friend, a private joke between them, a nod to one of their favorite painters. There’s a safe behind it, like it should, born of the caution he’d learned in his youth. He stores several flash drives and important documents there. Not a portrait, for there is no reason to, nor any travel journals, any mystical books, any magical jewelry.

His throat closes up. He leans against the wall and wheezes, fingers catching against the collar of his pajamas. There is no smooth jewel pinned to the top of his sternum. He hooks his fingertips on the notch between his collarbones at the same time his other hand searches his pockets. Only when his fumbling attempts turn up nothing does he allow himself to calm down, figure slumping down the wall.

Émilie still looks for the fabled miraculous.

There is little chance for those terrible times to repeat themselves, regardless of his wish. Nathalie was the one who found the miraculous.

Nathalie isn’t here.

He takes a page out of her book. Sits in the library with a tablet and dives into a wide and confusing world of information.

He searches through files and articles, uses the very illegal back-channels into government systems that both him and his wife, somewhat paranoid and inquisitive by nature, like to have, combs over records and lists. Every variation of her name, of her history, of her skillset, he looks for. His brain scrambles for details of a life he ought not to remember as well as he does. Her bank accounts, her service record, her host families… Numbers and names and pieces of a life he’d seen once upon a lifetime, presented in a big folder for his perusal and approval.

All for naught.

He could spend money on private investigators, Gabriel’s army of lawyers and personnel. People like her, who know how to navigate all this data and operate all these strings. He does not fear the suspicion or wrath of Émilie, who believes in magic, who found a diamond in the rough and brought her into their home. He fears what he already knows.

Nathalie Sancoeur has never existed. Not in this life.

He wonders if she died in the womb. Did her mother abandon her in a more desolate place? His mind considers the effects of December’s cold nights on infants left on churches’ doorsteps.

Tired eyes stare hazily back at him from the dark surface of his coffee. He does not think of Nathalie before a good cup of coffee.

The quiet clink of porcelain to his left draws his eyes. Adrien meets his eyes fleetingly before returning to his glass of orange juice. Gabriel knows his schedule is overseen and coordinated by someone who works almost directly under him and Émilie. He has never met the man face to face.

The day’s breakfast is eerily reminiscent of the Before. A heavy silence settles between the two Agreste. Émilie’s early morning departure leaves a hole in their dynamic. Yet it somehow soothes him. He knows this. He does not like it, but the familiarity is a balm to his strained mind.

He wonders how he’ll manage to work in the atelier, when everything’s off. He changes his schedule in a fit of pique, knowing it will throw havok into the company’s gears without Nathalie there to handle it. The chaos and subtle hints of panic as he visits the office to use the drawing room there validate his thoughts. Nathalie’s compulsive adherence to schedules, combined with her knowledge of his whims, had ensured that there was always a back-up plan to the back-up plan.

The little voice in his head sounds like Nooroo, lamenting how one never appreciates what one has until...

He gets nothing done that day.

Nor the next.

Or the one after.

His only balm is Émilie, who has always known how to handle him. Her touch is cool on his raging, hair-thin temper. Except when she dons her most customary pantsuit, the one they interred her with, and Gabriel’s vision inverts- and he’s seeing a different woman he loves just as much, in black not-white, brunette not-blonde, blue-eyed not-green. She appeals to his heart like a master pianist, and yet he misses a steady, reasonable voice. How it bloomed with emotion to some unknown sign…

Dear God, how blind he’d been.

Adrien both helps and doesn’t.

His son flip flops between moods. He is sullen and sad, then agitated and almost angry. Gabriel catches him more than once fidgeting with his hands, looking lost. He still has no idea of how to speak with him, just like when Émilie had been lost to them. He can speak with his son, he remembers doing it, he knows his role as the strict parent. He knows exactly how much a compliment or advice from him, in moderation of course, can make Adrien brighten up. These moods of him are worrying but at the same time so familiar that it relaxes his frayed nerves.

Émilie comes to him one late afternoon,a hint of distress in her eyes. "Could you talk to Adrien? He won't tell me what is wrong but you've noticed it too, haven't you?"

He sighs and grabs her hand. "I did. I thought perhaps it was a problem at school," he lies, "but if he refuses to speak to you it must be serious."

He kisses her hand, lips hovering with hesitation just one instant over her skin because he'd never… had the chance…

He finds Adrien in the worst possible spot. He finds him on the room of the first floor that overlooks the house's front gates. He checked the room only by habit. He has been avoiding it. It is just a guest bedroom, one of half a dozen peppered through the house. Before the wish, it had been kept clean and prepared for when needs must made Nathalie stay overnight. In the last days, she’d lived there in all but name. He did not want her out of his reach, vulnerable as she was.

It makes him hesitate on the doorstep.

Adrien, sitting on the bed, is an echo of all the times he caught them together, ostensibly for her to check his homework. He knew it was his son’s way to spend time with her in a way that still felt productive.

“Who was she?” Adrien’s voice returns him to the present, to reality.

“S-She? What are you talking about Adrien?” He almost stumbles and his words plummet in temperature as he deflects.

Adrien scowls. “I don’t know! That’s the problem, I don’t know and you do!” He got up suddenly and crossed the room to stand in front of Gabriel. “I’m angry and sad but I have no reason to. Mother’s… just Mother but I’m afraid she’ll disappear all the time! I’m missing things and stuff is not where it’s supposed to be! All my schedules and lessons are mixed up and I’m always looking for help and someone, someone who’s supposed to be there just isn’t! I just know it, alright!” His son was panting by the end of the deluge of words, hands clenched tightly by his side.

His mouth feels like a desert. He doesn’t know how to respond. How does Adrien even remember anything. He postulated he remembered only because he’d wielded the ultimate miraculous together. “Adrien…”

“And you know what I’m talking about Father. You’ve been acting weird too, we noticed.” Shiny, angry green eyes bore into his. “Mother noticed too but she doesn’t know what’s going on. So… Father, please… what did you do?”

The question strikes him like a physical blow and he takes a step back. Anger and shame and despair rise in waves, and he’s snapping back before he can even think. “What was necessary!”

The sound echoes in a too empty room as Adrien stares back at him, shoulders raised protectively up to his ears, brow furrowed, tense jaw. But he doesn’t look away from him, and Gabriel can read it in his eyes, in every accusing motion, every disappointed glint, what he’s surely thinking.

But what was the price?

He becomes aware that his own breathing has picked up. He straightens up and neatens his cravat, ignoring single-mindedly how his fingers are shaking. He forces his lungs to expand and contract at his own pace. He closes his eyes even. Let Adrien know that his discussion is over.

He still feels his son’s eyes on him as he turns around and walks away, two itching spots on his back.

“Nathalie.” He says, pausing in between two steps. He’s not quite sure why he says it, but that he can’t bear the thought that, of the two, he’s the only one who remembers the amazing woman who looked after them both. “Her name was Nathalie.”

“Nathalie.” Adrien repeats after him, wonder in his voice. He mutters the name to himself, rolling it around like someone who has discovered something precious, like he doesn’t want to forget it.

But he does.

The wish is entropic. He draws Nathalie, every line of her face and body immortalized on the back of his eyes, but days after the page is ruined, running with ink. Written word is corrupted, memory scattered, speech lost. He can tell that Adrien too forgets, even if his anger remains as stubborn embers somewhere within. He doesn’t bother Émilie with his burden.

The only safe place is his mind.

He can’t tell if he still remembers every little motion of hers, every gesture and micro-expression, the curve of her rare smiles… the feeling of her hands beneath his. Or if maybe, he’s just fooling himself. That his neurons are compensating, filling the gaps with lurid and vivid imaginations.

He doesn’t know what he’d prefer. How can he move on, this time, if he can’t forget? How can he honour her dying words, if he cannot stop mourning her? He had not had this problem with Émilie. He’d been forgetting her living countenance slowly, pushing further and farther in his efforts to retrieve the ladybug and black cat miraculous.

Émilie retrieves one of their better bottles of wine one night, after sending Adrien to bed. He silently asks her why the Port instead of their customary Chardonnay. 

She settles on one of the chairs, a mysterious smile on her lips. “Remember that old project of mine? The one we decided was best left of as a background activity?”

Slowly, but inexorably, Gabriel’s heart falls, thundering louder and faster. He wets his lips on the glass, hiding his distress behind a large gulp of a wine stronger than he is used to. “I… do believe so. The magic jewelry, Émilie? I thought… you’d actually given up on that, dear.”

Émilie shakes her head, sighing with fond exasperation. “The Miraculous, Gabriel. You know I know that you don’t really believe in magic and miracles.” Oh, but he does. He knows those far too well and intimately. “In any case, I’ve recently had something of a breakthrough, in between rummaging through my dusty old books and all those museum exhibits.” She says with a hint of teasing.

“Have you?” Is all Gabriel can make himself utter.

“Indeed. It was that new statue at the Louvre that pointed me in the right direction.” He knows that statue. There are many non-memories pertaining to that thing. “I know that what I’m looking for is in Tibet. I’ve even managed to pinpoint the best place to look for them. I was thinking we could make a family trip out of it, this summer. All three of us in Tibet. Adrien’s never been there either, it could be very educational for him.” She continues speaking with excitement.

Gabriel is hearing it as though underwater.

Something dark and hungry is rising in the place of his heart. It has resided in the hole that Nathalie once occupied. A familiar beast. A gnawing need for action, for control. It whispers to him, how he could fix this imbalance. Gives him ideas to counter the balancing of scales so that he does not lose anything else, anymore, ever.

The rest of his recoils from it. It tries to stuff the shadow back down where it came from. It knows exactly how this starts, what happens, and how much it destroyed him. He has been burned and now he shies away from it all. The possibility of hurting like so again… never. To disrespect Nathalie’s most explicit wish… he cannot possibly.

But Gabriel is a divided man. Between choices, between worlds, between two women he loves equally. This but a temptation. He can resist it. It would make Émilie happy. It might provide him with answers. Closure. Something.

“I think it sounds like a wonderful idea.”

* * *

**Gabriel’s Last Minute Delays caused by Exhaustion and Stress, Wife Claims**

**Gabriel Agreste Just Took His Entire Family To Tibet’s Most Magical Places**  
Here’s the Where of Tibet’s most fashionable icon right now

 **adrienagreste** 🟐 I’m so excited to share these news!  
Gabriel is back after an extended vacation, with black and red power! Shots by @valentinphotography  
4w  
**ninolalbeats**  
wow, not kidding dude these are some of your dad’s fiercest designs  
4w 28 likes  
\--- View replies (5)  
38,589 likes  
SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

**Paris’ First Superhero - Paon Rises!**

* * *

[1] I am happy. (French) [ ▲ ]

[2] I love you. (French) [ ▲ ]

**Author's Note:**

> A reminder to check out the [ART](https://speckleflowersummer.tumblr.com/post/637775742529404928/) made by Speckleflower.
> 
> And now, final considerations::
> 
>  **Anagnorisis:** Literary device used in Greek tragedies. As Aristotles said "a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune". This story was formatted like a modern interpretation of a Greek Tragedy (from someone who never studied them beyond secondary education). It has two episodes, a chorus (using social media as a modern interpretation of social commentary made by the "general populous") singing a stasimon as well as an opening and ending (the prologue and exodus... somewhat) and, of course, wow hubris, much hamartia, such peripeteia, many very long greek words... Hopefully that was a cute gimmick.
> 
>  **On Wine:** Émilie is British so her favored wine to toast is a good Port, which is stronger than most Chardonnay, a white wine usually from Alsace, France. Gabriel is not a big drinker so a glass of Chardonnay after dinner is more than enough for him.


End file.
